Get Your Emails Delivered, Read and Remembered

Email marketing is the cornerstone of many small business marketing campaigns. But its popularity has meant that the inboxes your emails end up in are full of a lot of other marketing messaging. So how can you make sure that the emails you’ve spent time and money creating and distributing are delivered, read and remembered?

Get it Delivered

There are a lot of ways for your email marketing message to end up in a junk or spam folder so the first step to any email marketing campaign is to make sure it’s delivered. Commercial emails must comply with relevant legal standards like CAN-SPAM and the EU Data Privacy Act. These include requirements like whitelisting the IPs you use to send your email, clear subject lines, and clear and easy opt-out. Most ESPs will automatically take care of this for you.

Get it Read

The next hurdle your email faces is getting opened and read. A clear and compelling subject line will help and can be easily tested. Keep it under 30 characters to ensure it will be displayed on mobile phones. You should also make the “From” address clear with branding so your audience knows who is sending them an email. If you create valuable emails, you’ll find your audience will search for your emails specifically.

Maintaining your email lists will help ensure your emails are going to people who will read them. Set thresholds based on recipient activity to avoid sending emails to inactive users. You can also unsubscribe hard bounces on the first bound and consider a threshold for changing soft bounces to hard bounces. Finally, allow your subscribers the option to change the frequency and type of emails they receive so they don’t simply “unsubscribe” but instead create more valuable preferences you can respond to.

Get it Remembered

The final challenge for your email marketing campaign is to get your email remembered. There are pages and pages of “best practices” on Google, but ultimately it will depend on two things: is it relevant? Is it simple? If the content of your email is not relevant with valuable information, your audience will simply delete it with the other “junk”. Similarly, if your email design is cluttered or it’s unclear what the call to action is, your target will not engage further and quickly forget all about your email.

Relevant information can be as simple as sharing interesting information in a newsletter or point of view but can also include a coupon code. Communicate this information simply. For example, if you’re sending a coupon, create one big image that displays the coupon value boldly on the image linked to your site. Follow it with a few lines about how to use it and where.

Relevant. Simple.

To learn specific best practices you can incorporate into your next email marketing campaign, sign up for our free webinar today.